I’m a sixty-eight-year-old baby boomer. I was born colored, then Negro, then African American, and now Black. Oh, and I am a Blesbian too.
I attended segregated schools more than a decade after Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, which was ruled three years before my birth. Thus, I was not surprised by the recent Pew Research Center survey finding that almost half of U.S. adults have come to doubt whether there will ever be racial equality in this country.
According to the survey, only 51 percent of Americans believe Black people will “eventually” have rights equal to white people. That means 49 percent of those surveyed, up from 39 percent in 2020, think Black folks will never have equal rights.
Unsurprisingly, white folks were more optimistic than Black folks in believing equality is an attainable goal. Sixty-one percent of the whites surveyed think it is likely that Blacks will eventually have equal rights with white Americans, while two-thirds of Black folks do not think this will ever happen. While I was not part of the survey, I agree with the two-thirds.
The survey, conducted in February 2025, is titled, “Views of Race, Policing, and Black Lives Matter in the five years since George Floyd’s Killing,” referring to the recorded murder that supposedly reset the discussion about race in America.
That spring and summer of 2020, labeled “a time of racial reckoning,” reignited the Black Lives Matter movement, which has been around since 2013, and even generated some mutterings about ours now being a “post-racial” world.
There were protests after Floyd was murdered, as there are protests now. The Pew survey shows that 72 percent of those surveyed feel the increased focus on race and racial inequality did not lead to changes that improved the lives of Black people.
So by what measure can we say we are moving closer to equality?
We elected a Black president—twice, but we could not elect a Black and Asian woman as president. Instead, we elected Donald Trump, who has done everything in his power to roll back what progress to racial equality has been made.
He has rescinded civil rights protections through executive orders. Among them were orders to: remove LGBTQ+ and HIV-related resources from federal websites; transfer transgender women in federal prisons to men’s facilities (there are legal challenges, and this order is at the time of this writing being blocked from enactment by a federal judge); ban transgender folks from serving in the military (the courts have agreed to allow the purge to begin); dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives resulting in mass terminations; and end affirmative action and DEI in federal contracting.
Trump also fired longtime Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden (the first Black person and the first woman to hold that position), claiming she was advancing a “woke” agenda.
So, we get it. No affirmative action. No DEI. No attempt at equality. Trump is ending all of these efforts across the federal government and pressuring the private sector to follow suit. The result is that people all over the country are making their disapproval known by taking it to the streets.
And, of course, when the opportunity presents, they will be taking the cause of equal rights to the ballot box.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.